Late in the week: My friend E texts me…. doesn’t know where I am. Nobody really knows where I am these days. This is not metaphorical, mind you. There are literally a handful of people that actually know my physical location. And this, simply because I’d neglected to mention the fact. Where ever I may be, the aforementioned text also says that, where ever I am, he would be in both of the potential places that I would be, at certain times and invites me to 2 separate soirees in two separate cities on two separate coasts… you guessed it, approximately two weeks apart.

That Saturday (three days?), he will be downtown at the Living Room on Ludlow playing with his band.

The aforementioned some later time, he will be in that opposite coast place, at his apartment/duplexy home, co-hosting a barbecue.

In keeping with the adult theme (not like dirty adult… just like actual ‘taking responsibility for your person and your actions and thinking beyond the next 2 seconds-adult), I want to be where the barbecue is. I want to go to the semi-domestic-type barbecue that I’ve been invited to with his girlfriend and young-adult chatter. I want to pretend, again, that I already am something that I’m, currently, half-commited to be. I really really really kind of want this.

Alas, I am 0 for 1. I am not in that opposite coast place now; far away only in space… but space counts, I suppose as much as time as far as practicality goes. So…

Going back to number 1, I will be downtown and available to see a friend on Ludlow Street on that Saturday. No substitute for the adult-soaked Mid-Wilshire barbecue and/or a growing semblance of evolution, but as good as I can get at this point? Sooooo, I go.

Annnndddd…. ACTION!

It’s really not like that, however. I decided to tell E where I was and actually go and not just surprisingly show up somewhere a la kiko of years past because I was rockin’ the adult thing. And because I thought that I may be able to transcend location (space, whatever). With my friend E, I feel that I had started this sort of thing. Respect and general relatively mundane adult behaviour. …I say ‘relatively’ mundane …to syringes and speed and benders that went on for days. In any event, I kind of really didn’t have any sort of business going at all, what with my no-money and no-job and no-actual anything and all. I went because it seemed like an adult thing to do. Or atleast, it resembled the closest thing that I could grasp as adult. Sooooo….

Subway downtown.

And this is where “action” should really be called.

For routine’s sake, I suppose… subway downtown, wine in a Coke cup with a straw. Didn’t need to get my drink-on… just thought: It’s wine in a cup with a straw. It’s also around 9:30pm and I’m completely sober… these things somehow = ‘this behaviour is okay, makes sense and therefore, I don’t really have to think about what I’m doing, ergo… learn and adjust potential behaviour’. Really, it’s embedded routine and a taste of autonomy vs. chill the fuck out (this is not five years ago, you’re not going to W 4th to see the guys play The Bitter End, you don’t care about being fleetingly fun and cute and… whatever).

Anyway, in the end, as traced from the beginning “fleetingly fun and cute and whatever” wins out… routine, man… it’s fuckin’ routine, man. And now, I can’t say that I don’t know how it happened, all wide-eyed because I’ve just told you.

*The rest is mostly written LIVE-like on a blackberry wordpad as I progressively get drunk. (that’s why it reads like I’m on crack)

Later…
I walk up the stairs from the subway… somewhere downtown. …somewhere downtown east, even. hmm… Disoriented (as exiting any subway station, for anyone… even the most embedded of denizens of this city are), I am ‘between’… among, a sea of others. …must ….manage ….energy of ‘winning the stairs’. Must go up as fast as humanly possible. However, vertically, horizontally, everything-ly, I am between… among and possibly burdened by the external. …however, it’s not a burden; it’s a sea of people that move. One adjusts their speed or pace and ‘winning the stairs’ in one’s real-time, becomes, a concept though so singularly focused, comfortably adjustable here-and-there. In that way, I might, leg-half-lift’d, wait a millisecond more for the person in front of me that might also wait for the person in front of them in the same manner as I (or conversely struggle just a bit with the pace). But the sea of people move but we all adjust and somehow become one. But somehow, we all remain intensely individual.

So now, I slo-mo clop up the stairs in the intensely individual pseudo-socialistic adjustment bureau that I find myself in. It smells like NY… late summer. This is comforting. This is something familiar; something familiar that strikes one over the head like an all-engulfing mallet (smashing an entire hemisphere of one’s brain to absolute minutiae) with no effort on the part of any party on any side of this ill-conceived metaphor/simile.

I stare, though. A wide-eyed stare that I once rocked as ‘my thing’. …a million years ago. Similar-to anyway. …the stare. Familiar again in a displaced manner; a displaced tone. The same low energy. This low-energy concerns me, however. I know its not the same… Its not as naïve and sweet and pure.

I may have depleted all of my dopamine or actually, it seems, serotonin receptors yesterday…. at T‘s place. I forget that I’m not the severe, ritualistic alcoholic that I was just a few months ago… Physically. And physically, I handle it in the way that only a novice/born-again-whatever can.

Everything is up for grabs now. This is grand without saying. But the ritualistic and unfamiliar just catches one sometimes… Off-guard and all. …when they are presented in such a stringent and spontaneous-like manner. I’ve spun so many things in so many directions too many times, most likely. And now, when I can ‘check myself’ for a second… Even the most familiar is based on this spin. The familiarity is incongruent, discontinuous, piecey… and dizzying as a result.

And I know enough to know better (atleast I’d like to think so), but its still a jarring prospect that nothing can remain the same.

Drinkdrinkdrink… watch the band. Hug people. Say hello to others. drinkdrinkdrink. Say hi to E, talk as much as we can above the music; but there is something going on. Something that doesn’t involve me, probably. I sense this, so I go… (he tells me that he is kind of offended, though, that I hadn’t mentioned the whole picking up and definitively moving to the other coast)

Even later…
And so, some cute-kiko version of the beast has been unleashed… Moremoremore. And walking on ludow, I need to focus on getting to the F or something. I am not hungry… But I needneedneed, somehow now. And need equals hunger? Then… Katz’s… Yeah-yah! I don’t but I do… Want roast beefish things inbetween bread… Even though I actuaLly can’t fathom chewing and esophageal southward movement of ‘stuff’ to eventually fester in my stomach. Then food pregnancy. But for some reason… I want for anything. More alcohol; consumption of food…. Something… Moremoremore… Something, please. I go in… it’s all confusing… and really all I really want is more drink.

This is not drink. And so, finally, I end up at the Egyptian boy.

Oh, I hadn’t mentioned the Egyptian boy? There is an egyptian guy. Or boy. I am again in penn station and again, I am confronted with time. Slow… Fast… Passage, time. What-the-fuck-ever. The egyptian boy works the place that sells the french fries (grave fuckin yard style… the working of the boy; not the style of the fries). I see this as I pass (off of the uptown a,c,e… Whatever) I am as drunk as my body can accept (abnormally… Incongruently)… I am also poor as fuck.

The rest of the night/day goes:
1. sleeping in the transitional place between penn station, nj transit and armtrack? or whatever that other thing is.
2. major headache hungover, can’t deal.
3. sitting miserably downstairs against a penn pole
4. weird child molester-looking guy talks to me. he is not a child molester… but I feel that he is autistic. I say this multiple times. He says that he is in sports. Um-hmm, sports. He rarely speaks, but when something is awesome to him, he prefers the term “fantastic”.

I don’t fuck him or anything. I mean, this is all just too mundane. and, yes, Leon, I am a stranger in a strange land… in strange-ass times.

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It was a Friday. And I was feelin’ fine. Strangely fine. Not blissed-out mind you… just fine enough that I could honestly say, “it’s all good” and bring the hearty truth of the statement forth.

My friends have a band. This band has a show. This night. This particular Friday.

“You should come.”

I reckon I will.

Let off of work early, however, I am left to my own devices.

And it’s all time… time… time. I mean, 11:00pm guys? Really?! Any earlier…

But I handle it like a pro. …the time.

Finish reading a script (which was pretty kick ass). Clean a bit. All lovely, slow ‘things to do’. And I do them. And I’m feelin’ fine. Like a normal person that carries out actions… does stuff… within time.

It’s simply simple. And simply incredible.

So… I go to the show. Show’s great. See friends… exquisite. And I continue to exist in the mood of laconic, slow, low-key ‘fine-ness’. Mighty grand.

None of this has anything to do with “adorably cute”, of course. But now is the time to segue like all of the motion that stays in motion until I step abruptly on the brake and stop short… after I remember that I am actually driving.

So, good friend has girlfriend. Much younger than he. Slightly younger than me. I’ve known her in a passing version of theory for a while. I meet her aforementioned Friday. Introduce myself. Hand out, firm handshake and a smile. Good Friend apparently unable to bring me around any girlfriend he may have at any slice of time’s present. And she’s quite pleasant.

Later, I find out, she found me adorably cute.

And, I must say, in anyone’s defense, I am adorably cute… sometimes. And I don’t take offense or anything. It’s just as I’ve gotten older, adorably cute increasingly sounds a bit condescending.